The concept of a soccer sweeper is something that can be applied to business formations too. The objective of a sweeper is to clear dangers that got past the initial defense.

I know it might sound strange to see “customer request” of “business actions” as an attack, but bare with me… We tend to set up our organization in a way that we structure all the flows. Yet we often see that informal streams exist or that bottleneck situations occur. It is in these situations that a sweeper role becomes interesting.

A sweeper is mostly a player who has great insight (experience) into the play and keeps a general overview. When something happens that’s not part of our flow, then he jumps in and clears the issue. We sometimes bring in the concept of “Service Level Managers” to tackle these issues. In other coorporations they’re called a different more sexy name. The point is that you have to consider a “sweeper” role…

Who to pick?
To be honest, I haven’t finalized my view on that matter yet. Currently I see two types of persons who might fulfil the role.

One is a young (at heart) person who doesn’t rank high in the organization. It’s a typical “hands on” guy who likes to keep a general overview of everything and isn’t shy of new things. The tough part is for his manager to get an insight on his work(load).

The other person is kind of a “teamleader”, who manages the team (in a structural way), where he jumps in (on technical matters) when things get rough. The advantage here is that this leader knows the painful spots of the organisation, and he’s in a situation to lobby/act for corrections. An additional surplus is that he gains in respect from his peers, as he’s doing the same “shit” as they are. He’s not “boss-ing” them around.

Sidenote

The same concept applies to Volleyball too. They have a sweeper (called libero) too. This person is in charge of doing solely defense stuff, and is not allowed in offense. He’s there to get the team out of the tough attacks and jump into the holes of the defense.

Never use more than ONE libero (free role). It might seem tempting, but a team with more free players will forget it’s tactics and create too many holes. One should drill (procedures!) a team to create SOP’s (standard operating procedures). This organisation has to be able to catch 95%. The libero is only there when a play goes wrong!

Children are naturally creative, playful & experimental
Most of us have lost these abilities when gowing up. We’ve put the creative aspect away for only artists to use. Yet everyone should be the artist in it’s own line of work.

You may say that there is nothing creative about working in a regular business. But do you think that if there was no creativity within a business, that it could become innovative or differentiate itself within a given sector?

Within the zen teaching one often speaks of the “beginner’s mind” (or child’s mind). One who approaches life with a beginner’s mind is fresh, enthusiastic and open to a wide range of ideas. When one does not know what’s possible, one will be open to exploration/discovery. Unburdened by your fixed views/habits/…, one will see things more clearly.

IntroductionFor a long time I used an old XBOX with the homebrew mediacenter for my media purposes. Being the Open Source enthusiast, I didn’t want to have a proprietary vendor lock-in by the market leaders in Belgium (Belgamcom TV & Telenet). So I joined the only decent alternative (being TV Vlaanderen : satellite provider)), as they allow the use of own hardware.
At a given point my girlfriend wanted to record her favorite show when she wasn’t at home, and I wanted a cheap alternative to stream the tv across the home. MythTV came on top after checking out different alternatives. Freevo didn’t seem to convince me, VDR looked decent, but in the end MythTV had the upperhand on marketshare & documentation.
Anyways… I bought my self the hardware to setup my box, which included an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI motherboard. But how could I forget to check this… the chipset it used an ATI chipset for it’s integrated video (being the X1250). After setup in the MythTV box with MythBuntu everything worked like a charm, except the “LiveTV”. It was “laggy”, “choppy”, … a tad to slow to get passed the “WAF”-test (Wife Annoyance Factor).Continue reading “The unofficial guide to getting your TV-out working on an ATI X1250”→

Up in the Clouds

Views are my own

The content of this blog will, at all times, portray my own views. At no time will this reflect the views of the organization I am linked to. Neither can the information provided be used as support statement.